The Sharkey Institute

Facilities

The Seton Hall University Polling Center, located on the fifth floor of Jubilee Hall on the Seton Hall campus, is the nerve center of the Seton Hall Sports Poll.

Consisting of 18 work stations, each station has a dedicated PC. The PC at each work location is a state of the art call center. Each PC has an application installed that completes three basic functions:

Manage the script of the polling agent (or interviewer);

Help log the responses to a network server data base for later tabulation; and

Establish the telephone connection between the PC headset/microphone to the person being interviewed (or respondent).

The technology installed is full duplex voice over the internet – VOIP. Many point-to-point services (e.g. a laptop to a specific phone) are available today.

What makes the Sharkey Institutes SHU polling center special is that the 18 workstations automatically keep busy working the time zones across the country. The system recognizes when a polling agent has completed a call and begins auto dialing from a continental U.S. list of 10,000 random phone numbers to an appropriate time zone. Then, within a few milliseconds, the system connects an answered phone to the available polling agent.

The Seton Hall Sports Poll is sponsored by The Sharkey Institute, brought to you by The Stillman School of Business, and directed by Rick Gentile – a faculty member at Seton Hall University and 10 time Emmy Award winner for his work as Executive Producer and Senior Vice President of CBS Sports.